Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of tvOS 10.2 to Developers
Apple today seeded the fourth beta of an upcoming tvOS 10.2 update to developers for testing purposes, just over one week after seeding the third tvOS 10.2 update and more than a month after releasing tvOS 10.1.1, the current release version of tvOS.
Designed for the fourth-generation Apple TV, the fourth tvOS 10.2 beta can be obtained by connecting the Apple TV to a computer with a USB-C to USB-A cable, downloading and installing the software from a registered developer account via iTunes or Apple Configurator. Once a profile is installed, subsequent betas can be downloaded over the air.
Given the tricky installation requirements, tvOS betas are limited to developers and will not be provided to the public.
According to Apple’s release notes, tvOS 10.2 introduces improved scrolling behavior, allowing tvOS users to scroll through large lists of information more quickly. A large swipe on the Siri remote automatically activates the new scrolling mode, and a swipe on the far right side of the remote allows users to navigate specific indexes.
It’s likely there are other small feature tweaks and bug fixes included in tvOS 10.2, even though additional changes have not been specifically outlined by Apple. We’ll update this post should any new content be found in the fourth tvOS 10.2 beta.
Related Roundups: Apple TV, tvOS 10
Buyer’s Guide: Apple TV (Don’t Buy)
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Apple Possibly Exploring AR in Israel as Robert Scoble Insists ‘Mixed Reality’ Glasses Are Coming
Augmented reality could be the “next big thing” for Apple, according to the latest research from UBS analyst Steven Milunovich.
Milunovich believes that Apple could equip the iPad and iPhone with AR-enabled hardware such as sensors, 3D cameras, and custom chipsets over the next two to three years.
He speculates the iPhone 8, for example, could have “moderate 3D mapping using stereoscopic vision” based on a technology called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.
An excerpt from his research note obtained by MacRumors:
SLAM solves the chicken and egg problem of mapping a space without prior knowledge. The device starts from one angle and collects points of data. As the device moves, it observes how objects shift and begins to fuse data to create an environment. As the 3D map is forming, the device begins to understand its own positon in the context of the environment it is trying to map.
SLAM underlies most of the advanced AR technologies available today and will likely be critical in the future. In 2015, Apple bought software company Metaio, which had one of the most advanced SLAM-based AR engines available at the time. The company has been silent since being acquired, but according to our industry checks it’s likely the core team has remained and the IP could play a key role in Apple’s strategy.
Milunovich, citing “some industry sources,” added “there may be over 1,000 engineers in Israel working on projects that could be related to AR,” but he expects Apple to slowly roll out augmented reality features until the technology becomes more mainstream and “reaches a level of maturity suitable for Apple’s brand.”
Perhaps related, iPhone 8 development is said to be ongoing at Apple’s offices in Israel. Earlier this month, Apple acquired Israeli startup RealFace, a cybersecurity and machine learning firm specializing in facial recognition technology. And in November 2013, Apple acquired Israeli 3D sensor company PrimeSense.
Milunovich said that because new technologies must fit within and grow the Apple ecosystem, the company will likely release an augmented reality SDK that is tightly integrated with iOS.
Beyond the next two to three years, Milunovich thinks an additional AR-enabled hardware device is possible, citing tech evangelist Robert Scoble’s belief that Apple will launch a pair of smart glasses in partnership with German optics company Carl Zeiss. The report said the glasses could launch as early as 2017.
In November 2016, Bloomberg likewise reported about Apple working on a pair of smart glasses that would connect wirelessly to the iPhone and display “images and other information” to the wearer.
Scoble recently told MacRumors that Apple is “readying a three-ounce pair of glasses that pair with the iPhone 8 for mixed reality.” He insists that “mixed reality,” which he refers to as “next-generation augmented reality,” will be key to Apple’s future products. Treat this info with a proverbial grain of salt for now.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly expressed his interest in augmented reality. He recently said AR is “a big idea like the smartphone,” but noted “there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream.” In the past, he said AR is “profound” and should “amplify” human contact.
Related Roundup: Apple VR Project
Tags: Robert Scoble, UBS, Steven Milunovich
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How to factory reset an iPhone (every generation)
A clean slate can work wonders in life, especially when it comes to the numerous gadgets and gizmos we use on a daily basis, like the iPhone. Although performing a factory reset of your smartphone may not sound ideal — it essentially wipes your device of any and all personal settings and data you’ve acquired through the years — it’s occasionally necessary when troubleshooting your device for software errors or when retaining your private information is of the utmost importance, such as during a sales transaction or repair.
More: Next iPhone’s production may begin earlier — for sped-up release date?
However, restoring any iPhone to its original factory settings, whether it’s an iPhone 7 Plus or an iPhone 5S, is a simple a process that requires little more than your phone and five minutes of your time. Once completed, you’ll quickly notice that all of your phone’s data and content — songs, videos, contacts, photos, calendar info, etc.– have automatically been deleted, thus safeguarding your personal information and preventing it from falling into the wrong hands should you sell your device.
Scroll down for our quick guide on how to factory reset an iPhone, so you can ditch the data before passing on your device. The exact process for doing so may vary slightly depending on which version of iOS your iPhone is running, but it’s essentially the same regardless if you’re performing a factory reset using iTunes or your untethered phone. Furthermore, feel free to follow the same directions when performing a factory reset on any of your iOS devices.
How to factory reset an iPhone using iCloud
Whether you have an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, an iPhone SE, an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, or an older model, like the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, or 5S, the easiest way to factory reset your iPhone is to use iCloud.
Step 1: Prepare your iPhone for restoration
Go into your iPhone Settings menu — Settings > iCloud — and turn on the items you’d like to back up. We recommend you choose to back up almost everything, but especially your Photos, Mail, Contacts, and Notes. Once you have chosen what you would like to back up (and keep in mind that anything you do not back up will be lost forever once you perform the reset), scroll down until you find the Backup button with the green icon. Click it and turn on iCloud Backup with the toggle switch. Then, if you’re connected to Wi-Fi, you will be able to Back up now. Keep in mind that it will take a few minutes.
For more detailed instructions, check out our guide on how to use iCloud to back up your iPhone.
Alternatively, you can also still rely on a PC a little bit. Connect your iPhone to your computer via USB and click the gray Back Up Now button when viewing the Summary tab for your given device in iTunes.
Step 2: Access the Reset menu
Tap the main Settings icon when viewing the home screen, select General on the resulting menu, and tap the Reset button at the bottom of the resulting page.
Step 3: Reset your iPhone
Tap the blue Erase All Content and Settings option near the top, followed by the red Erase iPhone option in the resulting pop-up window to confirm your decision.
Step 4: Restore your iPhone
Once the reset process is complete — a process that may take up to several minutes — check to ensure your phone has been restored to its original factory settings. If done correctly, you’ll once again be presented with the iOS Setup Assistant upon startup, from which you can then restore your phone from a backup or continue the process as if you were setting it up anew.
You’ll have to log in and set up your iPhone from scratch once it has been factory reset. The prompts will ask you whether you want to restore from your iCloud account, set up a completely fresh phone without any of your previous settings, or use iTunes and a PC to put your old content onto the phone again.
If you’re interested in what all the iPhone Reset options mean, then skip to the last page of this article. If you want to perform a factory reset using iTunes, follow the directions on the next page.
Hate lemon candy? This machine will sort your Skittles for you
Why it matters to you
This project showcases Arduino controllers, one of many tools modern makers lean on. And today’s dreamer or inventor may be tomorrow’s CEO.
If you’re a Skittles fan who wants to taste just one color of the rainbow, this new machine may be for you.
A 19-year-old mechanical engineering student from the Netherlands recently created a machine that can sort Skittles by color, then separate the candies into individual piles. Since most of us have a favorite flavor — and also a least favorite flavor that makes us cringe — this machine makes it so we no longer need to go searching through bags of candy to find the flavors we like.
The machine designed by Willem Pennings, who is currently studying at Eindhoven University of Technology, sorts at a rate of around two Skittles per second. It can also sort M&M’s, or you can modify the machine to sort other objects, as long as the individual pieces have a shape with even dimensions. This means you may even be able to use the sorter for things like marbles or game pieces.
More: 3D-printed candy company lets you print gummies
To function, the candy sorter uses an RGB color sensor. Pennings explains how he created the machine — from start to finish — on his website. He started the sorting machine in May 2016, and he completed it this past December. He shelled out a cool 500 euros, or $529 U.S., on prototypes and parts. To create it, Pennings modeled the machine on CAD software, sent the designs to a 3D -printing company for production, assembled the parts, and added the electronics. After a bit of testing, he finally developed a working sorter.
To all you candy lovers out there, you may be interested to know that the most popular Skittles flavor is strawberry. In a survey, 34 percent of respondents choose strawberry as their top flavor. Lime, orange, and grape are closely tied for second, with around 12 percent of people favoring each of them. The Skittles that no one seems to like are the yellow ones, with only 7 percent of people choosing lemon as their favorite.
Best app deals of the day! 6 paid iPhone apps for free for a limited time
Everyone likes apps, but sometimes the best ones are a bit expensive. Now and then, developers make paid apps free for a limited time, but you have to snatch them up while you have the chance. Here are the latest and greatest apps on sale in the iOS App Store.
These apps normally cost money, and this sale lasts for a limited time only. If you go to the App Store and it says the app costs money, that means the deal has expired and you will be charged.
More: 200 Awesome iPhone Apps | The best Android apps for almost any occasion
Songbot
Songbot is a powerful tool that can search every radio station in the world for the song you want to hear. Just type in the song name or artist you want and start listening immediately. Or choose from a list of currently playing songs from your favorite genre.
Available on:
iOS
picTrove Pro
This app promises to be the most advanced Internet photo searching and browsing app. While you’re browsing through images, picTrove is downloading further images in the background so you don’t have to wait for images to download.
Available on:
iOS
Preset
Create your own reusable photo filters by mixing and matching 27 adjustments from the library. Easy-to-use gestures allow users to swap, delete, and temporarily disable filters in their layer chain.
Available on:
iOS
Compress Video
Compress videos to free space on your device. This app re-encodes videos filmed on your device to a smaller file size while maintaining the same video quality. Also, it can compress videos in batch.
Available on:
iOS
balance
One of the more unique games on the App Store is also one of the most challenging. You’ll have to guess the weight on each side of the balance to keep the triangle in the right position.
Available on:
iOS
Word Search Mania
Word search fiend? Never run out of puzzles to play with this straightforward app, which comes with tons of games to keep you occupied for hours on end.
Available on:
iOS
Which gadgets to buy refurbished, how to buy them, and where
These days, it seems like there’s a never-ending conveyor belt of electronics circling our lives, but few of us can actually afford every device that catches our eye. Price tags on new gadgets are rarely reasonable. But if you take a dip into the refurbished market, you can get some of those gadgets at decent discounts, and if you’re careful, they’ll be indistinguishable from the new.
More: Apple reportedly requesting to sell refurbished iPhones in India — again
If you stick to certain categories and only buy from reputable sources, you can get all sorts of great gadgets for less. Glancing at the refurbished section of the Apple Store right now, you can get a refurbished Apple Watch Series 2 for $470, which amounts to a $70 discount. You could also save $110 on an iPhone 6S Plus (64GB), or $140 on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro (128GB). The lower price point isn’t the only advantage. Refurbished goods have often undergone stricter testing than devices fresh off the production line, and so you’re less likely to encounter a lemon.
What does refurbished mean?
Many people are put off by the ‘refurbished’ tag, but it’s a blanket term that covers a lot of potential scenarios. All it really means is that the product has been returned. The manufacturer may have repaired a minor or a major fault. It may have been returned because there is cosmetic damage to the product. It could have been returned because the packaging was damaged. There’s also a chance that the buyer just changed his or her mind.
In many cases you’ll get a device that is as good as new.
The manufacturer will fully test the product and make any repairs that are deemed necessary. It will then clean the product up, reset the software to factory conditions where appropriate, and repackage it. In many cases you’ll get a device that is as good as new. You can also expect it to work every bit as well, and last as long, as a brand new product.
Which gadgets to buy refurbished, how to buy them, and where
These days, it seems like there’s a never-ending conveyor belt of electronics circling our lives, but few of us can actually afford every device that catches our eye. Price tags on new gadgets are rarely reasonable. But if you take a dip into the refurbished market, you can get some of those gadgets at decent discounts, and if you’re careful, they’ll be indistinguishable from the new.
More: Apple reportedly requesting to sell refurbished iPhones in India — again
If you stick to certain categories and only buy from reputable sources, you can get all sorts of great gadgets for less. Glancing at the refurbished section of the Apple Store right now, you can get a refurbished Apple Watch Series 2 for $470, which amounts to a $70 discount. You could also save $110 on an iPhone 6S Plus (64GB), or $140 on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro (128GB). The lower price point isn’t the only advantage. Refurbished goods have often undergone stricter testing than devices fresh off the production line, and so you’re less likely to encounter a lemon.
What does refurbished mean?
Many people are put off by the ‘refurbished’ tag, but it’s a blanket term that covers a lot of potential scenarios. All it really means is that the product has been returned. The manufacturer may have repaired a minor or a major fault. It may have been returned because there is cosmetic damage to the product. It could have been returned because the packaging was damaged. There’s also a chance that the buyer just changed his or her mind.
In many cases you’ll get a device that is as good as new.
The manufacturer will fully test the product and make any repairs that are deemed necessary. It will then clean the product up, reset the software to factory conditions where appropriate, and repackage it. In many cases you’ll get a device that is as good as new. You can also expect it to work every bit as well, and last as long, as a brand new product.
Following probe, Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong indicted on bribery charges
Why it matters to you
Samsung has been at the center of a South Korean political scandal for months, and the government has finally brought charges.
The verdict is in, and it’s another blow to Samsung. After a months-long investigation into the role Samsung and its heir apparent Lee Jae-yong played in a political scandal that has rocked South Korea, prosecutors have announced that the Samsung executive will be indicted. He faces charges of bribery, embezzlement, perjury, hiding assets abroad, and concealing profit gained from criminal acts — and if found guilty, could be facing years in prison.
The case against Samsung involves around $37 million in alleged bribes made by the company to a close friend of President Park Geun-hye (who has been impeached). According to prosecutors, these payments were meant as financial incentive for the government to support a highly controversial merger that ultimately gave Lee more power.
The indictment comes weeks after Lee, who also serves as Samsung Electronics’ vice chairman, was arrested on February 17. Four other top-ranking Samsung officials have also be indicted on similar charges.
More: Samsung debuts new measures to stay out of any other bribery scandals
“Samsung was directly linked to the influence-peddling scandal and was essential to the special prosecutor’s investigation,” said Lee Kyu-chul, a spokesman for the special prosecutor, as per a Bloomberg report. “The indictment describes in detail the private conversation between Jay Y. Lee and President Park Geun-hye.” In a few weeks, South Korea’s Constitutional Court is expected to determine whether President Park will be removed from office.
Just a couple days ago, Samsung announced sweeping changes to its policies surrounding financial donations and corporate social responsibility in hopes of avoiding such a scandal in the future, but now, it appears that it is all too little too late. Just hours after Lee was indicted, the South Korean company announced the resignation of many of its senior executives, some of whom were also under investigation.
For more background on this developing story, check out our story here.
Google has shipped 10 million Cardboard VR headsets since launch in 2014
Why it matters to you
Need proof of virtual reality’s popularity? Look at Google’s new stats — 10 million Cardboard headsets shipped in 3 years.
Google Cardboard was first launched three years ago, and it seems to have done pretty well for itself. At Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, Google’s vice president of VR gave audience members an update on Google’s first foray into the virtual reality space. The super affordable headset is one of the least intimidating and most accessible ways of entering the world of VR, and it looks like plenty of people have done so. In fact, Google has shipped 10 million Cardboard VR sets and has seen 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps.
Even as Google pushes forward in the virtual reality space with Daydream, it’s clear that the company hasn’t forgotten its roots (and neither have users). Certain Cardboard apps have proven quite popular themselves — in fact, 30 of them have been downloaded one million or more times each. Much of Cardboard and its associated apps’ growth has only happened in the last year or so — in July of 2016, Google said it had sold 5 million headsets. Now, less than a year later, it has doubled that figure. To be fair, however, Google practically gives away these headsets, so this number isn’t all that baffling.
More: The NBA preparing to dunk fans in the action with virtual reality
But as wonderful as this low-cost headset may be, Singh says that there’s a lot to look forward to when it comes to the future of VR at Google. The Daydream promises to be a “more immersive” experience than its predecessor, and Google is working on more and more content for the platform. Currently, the majority of content consumption on Daydream comes from YouTube, and Singh noted that the Google-owned video streaming service will be looking to add more and better content in the near future.
“You will start to see significant series coming out this year,” Singh said.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what virtual reality can do, and soon, it looks like we’ll be seeing a whole lot more from this futuristic technology.
Connected CloudPets teddy bears blab on owners, leak 2 million voice recordings
Why it matters to you
Just a few weeks after connected doll Cayla was banned in Germany following privacy concerns, a connected teddy bear leaks voice recordings and account information of 2 million parents and children.
Remember when the worst thing that could happen to your doll was it losing an eye? How times have changed.
In the latest toy scandal (yes, those are a thing now), it would appear that a connected teddy bear has leaked the voice recordings of more than 2 million children and parents, along with email addresses and password information associated with more than 800,000 accounts. As first reported by Troy Hunt in a blog post published Tuesday, Spiral Toys, the company behind the CloudPets line of stuffed animals, left a whole lot of user data vulnerable to attack.
As Hunt wrote, “…in CloudPets’ case, that data was stored in a MongoDB that was in a publicly facing network segment without any authentication required and had been indexed by Shodan (a popular search engine for finding connected things).” So what does that mean? In essence, customer data could be easily accessed by just about anyone, and accessed it was. Hunt noted that as per data from Shodan, between December 25 and January 8, customer data was looked into many times by many people, including by malicious parties who demanded ransom for the release of some of this data.
More: Spy games: Could your kids’ toys be conducting surveillance on them?
Worse still, it would appear that CloudPets was actually warned of this problem, with Hunt noting that a good samaritan had “tried to contact CloudPets three times to warn them about the exposure.” Unfortunately, the email address listed on the company’s support page bounced back, and subsequent attempts at contact went unanswered.
Sadly, Hunt noted, this kind of willful ignorance seems to be rather commonplace, particularly in the realm of cybersecurity. “Time and time again, there are extensive delays or no response at all from the very people that should be the most interested in incidents like this,” he wrote. “If you run any sort of online service whatsoever, think about what’s involved in ensuring someone can report this sort of thing to you because this whole story could have had a very different outcome otherwise.”
AIVAnet 